No wings or fangs in Sharon Draper's written word of the real

Becoming an author

Sharon Draper uses junior Ernest Lewis as a prop as she reads an excerpt from her book Tears of a Tiger during a visit to First Coast Technical High School Wednesday morning, October 23, 2013. By DARON DEAN, daron.dean@staugustine.com To watch a video of Draper speaking, go to StAugustine.com

The world of entertainment probably lost a great stand-up comedienne when Sharon Draper went into the teaching field.

However, kids gained not only a top-flight teacher, but a first-rate novelist.

“I don’t write books with soft solutions. The characters in the books make decisions and, because of it, things happen,” Draper said Wednesday before giving dozen of students from St. Johns Technical High School the skinny on writing and publishing.

As she told the kids, she doesn’t do wings or fangs. “I don’t know any vampires. I don’t know any zombies,” Draper said, adding if she met any that might change.

In the meantime she focuses on the realistic: “real kids having real situations, real lives with real problems, how they get out of it. That makes a lot more sense than flying animals. … They need realism and they need some hope.”

But, she said, she doesn’t put in artificial hope. It’s possible to see someone’s life worse than their own and get strength from it, Draper said.

Her books, said SJTHS librarian Jeanine Livingstone, are incredibly popular. Livingstone read her first — “The Battle of Jericho” — at the urging of a student four years ago. Livingstone saw how much they appealed to kids at the school, which houses sixth through 12th graders and, even more encouraging, how they appealed to boys as well as girls. “Girls usually read more. But even the guys like these books,” she said.

“They’re all good books and they’re all clean,” Livingstone said.

The author’s visit is part of the school’s push to make students realize that “words matter ... Your ability to express yourself matters a lot,” as Principal Wayne King told them. That philosophy is a mainstay of the alternative school, which helps St. Johns County School District’s at-risk students.

Draper, who lives in Cincinnati, Ohio, “always knew” she was going to be a teacher. She was a success, chosen teacher of the year in Ohio and then national teacher of the year.

That teacher bubbled to the surface Wednesday as students entered the conference room, helter-skelter.

“Fill ‘em up, move ‘em up. Nobody sits in the back,” she told teachers and students. No one questioned her command and everyone obeyed.

The students applauded as Livingstone recited Draper’s honors including five-time Coretta Scott King Award winner, six-time visitor to the White House and representative for the U.S. in Moscow and in China.

But they really sat up — and laughed — when Draper told them, “You can do better than that. Didn’t I get you out of class?”

Then she took them into her world — advising to learn how to write before they sent off manuscripts to publishers, talking about how she grabs readers with the first words in her book, telling them to go into writing for the love of it not for the money.

She told them “you get ideas from the world you live in” noting hers may come from something she’s seen or heard, a news story or a comment.

Draper read from her books to illustrate points, pulling 10th grader Ernest Lewis up on stage as she read a sappy note from a girl to her boyfriend. After the first couple of sentences, Lewis pantomimed throwing the note over his shoulder. She drew even bigger laughs when she read the one word reply from the boy to the girl.

Draper, who has written 31 books, doesn’t go in for explicit scenes, but she does let people use their imagination as she writes of a not-always-gentle world. Her latest book includes abduction by a pedophile and on stage she wove a scenario that made the students realize how easily that could happen to them. It’s back to that decision thing.

Two of the guys in the audience listened intently to Draper, laughing with appreciation, occasionally making a comment. Asked if they’d ever read Draper, both Erick Cedeno and Jerrod Pettway said no.

“I might after this,” Pettway said and Cedeno nodded.

What more can any author ask?

Becoming an author

So how did Sharon Draper get into the writing business?

She was busy teaching — composition, grammar, Shakespeare, all that — when a student challenged her. He was, she said, the kind who “sits in the back of the class, never does his homework, curses under his breath.”

The kid told her, “You always make us write stuff, … you think you’re so bad,” and handed her a writing contest application.

She crumbled it up and stuck it in her purse, not thinking about it again until she was at the grocery and heard an angry mother threaten her crying 3-year-old.

When she got home, she thought about that scene and what would happen if after they got home, the mother cleaned up the child, then went out and the 3-year-old wandered about the house eventually picking up a lighter, catching the drapes on fire and then standing with fire around him, waiting for his mother to come home.

She sent the three-page story off and went back to teaching. Six months later she got a call telling her out of 20,000 entries hers had won the $5,000 prize.

Draper still taught, but now, “I knew I could write.”

Her first book, Tears of the Tiger, remains a favorite. Her second book, Forged by Fire was built on the three-page story and followed what happened to the 3-year-old. Her books have varied from a 17-year-old who inadvertently kills his friend to a book on a girl slave who flees not north but south to Fort Mose to a series on a little girl named Sassy.